GNOME Chess

GNOME Chess is a 2D chess game, where games can be played between a combination of human and computer players. GNOME Chess detects known third party chess engines for computer players.

GNOME Chess is written in Vala and uses GTK+ and Cairo to render the chess board using Cairo/rsvg. GNOME Chess requires a separately-installed chess engine if you want to play against the computer, but your Linux distribution probably installs one for you.

Now part of GNOME Games, GNOME Chess has a much longer history... GNOME Chess used to be known as glChess and there are still stand alone versions of glChess in the wild; some information about the old versions is here for historical reasons.